This is my personal view.
Over the past months, I had a diet of about 30-40% raw on average/week. Hardly what I had in mind. Yet the waking up earlier or the time invested in prep work for juices at night started bothering me. And as soon as I stopped having my juices, I stopped the 85% raw diet.
Over the fall and winter more things combined knocked me back into reality once more and one day I decided I would start eating raw again. This happened about 3 weeks ago, and as soon as I had my raw juice that morning I realized how much I had liked and missed the diet. It was one click in my brain that started it all again and it was the best choice I could have made that day. So I said 3 weeks indeed, and for most days (about 80% of the time) I ate only raw food. It’s not because I wanted to eat only raw food, but it’s because I didn’t feel the need to eat anything else but raw. My exceptions from going totally raw were (and still are):
- yogurt mixed with veggies
- two eggs in the salad
- cheese in the salad
- fish or seafood
Never two of them on the same day. And only in the evenings, at dinner. I use the ‘raw until dinner’ scheme and I plan to stick to it as close to 100% as I can.
So if I don’t miss the cooked food or the animal proteins much, why would I not go 100% raw? The answer is: I don’t want to.
While I do believe that 100% is healthy, I don’t like the idea of having to take B12 from pills or enriched nut milk. If we, as human beings, have developed to eat 100% indeed, then we wouldn’t have needed to supplement the 100% raw food with B12 – or, for what I know, maybe even other vitamins or minerals that we are not aware of right now.
On the other hand, I and my whole body feel exceptional, from all points of view while on 100% raw. But this is short term, as I haven’t been on it for years and years to be able to see the side-effects if any. Hence I like to keep my 15% of fish or sea-food protein in; same with some cooked foods (veggies or starch), eggs, and goat/sheep yogurts and cheeses. Processed food remains entirely out, together with meat or bread. Yet, if one day I will feel like having duck or lamb, I might just go for it too.
So it is up to you how much raw food you want to integrate into your diet. This is simply how I do it and how I see it.